The Rat

            A couple days ago when my mom went to do the laundry in our pantry/laundry room, what should run across the floor but the biggest rat I’ve ever seen!  Since Jared and I are the rat exterminators around here, we were sent to exterminate the rat. When we arrived on the case, our mom told us that she thought the rat went under the washer.  With that information, I knelt on the floor as Jared lifted the washer so that I could see our ugly furry friend and hopefully “destroy” it with our “all purpose” broom.  Well, I saw it all right and it was the largest and ugliest rat I had ever seen in my life (no kidding).  When I took my eyes off of him for just a second to prepare for the battle with my deadly weapon, he disappeared!  We figured he had gone up in the washer so we tried shaking him out with no avail.  Sorry to say, we had to surrender to the rat, but before totally “surrendering”, I sprinkled some rat poison around the washer so that there was still a chance of winning this battle.

            The next morning, I decided to check the washer again for the mouse and discovered that all of the rat poison I had sprinkled around the washer was gone.  Victory!  The only problem was that the rat was nowhere to be seen.  Sooner or later I was sure that someone would find it do to the smell.  It always seems to be easy to find dead things because they stink very badly.

            A couple days afterwards, Mom noticed that Sarah and Alina’s room had a peculiar smell.  She didn’t think anything of it because this was on the other side of the house from the pantry.  At least she didn’t think anything of it until the next day when maggots started falling out of the ceiling of their bathroom which is just next door.

            Once again the rat exterminators were sent to look in the attic for whatever was causing the awful smell and the maggots.  We prepared ourselves with a plastic bag, Doom (bug poison), and flashlights.  After climbing into the ceiling, we worked our way toward the area in which the awful smell and maggots had come from.  The awful stench was getting pretty strong now (we forgot to bring gasmasks).  Since we knew we were quite close to the spot where the dead “thing” was, we started shining our flashlights around looking for the odor-generating substance.  Then we saw what looked like a lizard’s tail resting on a rafter with maggots and ants all over it.  Upon closer examination, it appeared to be the rat in which we had been after for the past few days.  It was a pretty awful sight since it was about half rotten and smelled that bad.  Well, Jared decided to be the one to grab the rat and put it in the bag (I forgot to tell you that we did bring gloves).  After spraying the area well with Doom we made a quick evacuation out of there and onto the welcoming arms of the family.  Whew, what an experience!  

 

Kris